How To Start SEO For New Websites
You just launched a great-looking site with all the technical SEO in place. But Google is yet to come knocking. This is a familiar situation for most businesses with a new website. A successful website launch is only half the battle; getting your website to rank is a whole battle in itself. So, how to start SEO for ranking new websites? What are the tactics that you will need to focus on? Our battle-hardened SEO team in Perth answer these questions for you.
How to start SEO for new websites
Search engines want to give users relevant content. How do they determine relevancy? Through the content, the legitimacy of the website and user experience. So, SEO should aim to enhance these factors. Let’s go through some of the most vital SEO steps to make your websites search engine-friendly.
1. Choose an on-brand domain name
Select a suitable, identifiable domain name for your website. When you’re looking through your options, keep the following in mind:
- Spelling matters. It should be easy to spell your domain name. If it can be misspelled easily, people might miss it. Make sure that the domain name is short and easy to remember.
- Don’t underestimate branding. People tend to trust a company with a companyname.com link over a keyword-keyword.com link. Branded domains are a beneficial tool for increasing your visibility. It improves the authority of your website and increases the value of your content.
- Keywords are important. While having keywords in your domain name isn’t necessary anymore, registering the domain with a primary keyword won’t hurt.
2. Get the first external link
Search engines, Google mainly, follows links to find content. If another site doesn’t link to yours, your website wouldn’t be visible on Google. While you can get your site indexed by submitting in the Google Search Console, ranking doesn’t work like that. External links add value to your website – they tell Google that your site is trustworthy enough to be linked to. One of the first steps to do when working on SEO for a new website is to get at least one external link. If your site doesn’t show up in search pages even after linking, check the settings. If the settings are on noindex or are blocked by robots.txt, change them.
3. Craft high-quality content
To facilitate customer interactions and to achieve higher rankings, you have to create high-quality content. Blog posts, eBooks, brochures, videos, pictures, infographics, and all other media have to be of value and presented well. Make your content keyword optimised but avoid stuffing keywords everywhere. Remember to always write by keeping the human visitors in mind. Fresh and enticing content will attract more customers to you, and that will make Google trust you more. As you earn more trust from Google and the site visitors, your rankings will increase as well. If you need some tips to improve your content quality, here’s a 10-point checklist for content writing.
4. Do keyword research
Which brings us to the next point – Keywords. Content is the king who wouldn’t have a kingdom to rule without keywords. Before creating content for your website, do keyword research and note down the most relevant keywords in your niche. You can’t create content unless you know what your audience needs.
Check what queries your target customer demographic searches for the most. What are the results that are displayed for these queries? How can you relate your content to meet the search intent? Who are your competitors for the best ranking keywords? What can you offer to stand out from the competition? Make sure you have the answers to these questions before moving further. Learn more about keywords here.
5. Refine your snippets
Take a look at the snippets that are displayed when your site ranks in SERPs. Are the titles intriguing? Do the meta descriptions seem connected and inviting? If you feel like they are not, then start writing better ones. Just showing up on the SERPs is not enough. You have to make people click on your links. So, create snippets that will help attract more traffic to your website. While there is no guarantee that Google will pick up your snippet to display, having a good one ready is useful if Google decides to give your snippets a chance.
6. Optimise the source code
Content writing is important, but so is the website’s source code. You have to optimise the code to ensure that search engines read your content. This mainly includes the following:
- Create SEO-friendly URLs https://computingaustralia.com.au/how-to-create-seo-friendly-urls/
- Use canonical tags
- Make good use of meta description tags and heading tags
- Add alt tags for images etc.
- Employ interlinking
To read more on source code optimisation, click here.
7. Follow consistent link building
As mentioned already, links are essential. Both external and internal linking has a significant impact on your visibility. Reach out to more site owners in your niche and request them to mention your website. When multiple sites link to your website, Google will see that as a sign of authority and help get higher rankings. Internal link building will bring more attention to your web pages and help keep visitors on your site for a longer time. So, make sure you practice ethical and organic link building tactics.
It can be challenging to figure out how to start SEO for new websites. Following the above steps will help create a healthy foundation for your website. It is necessary to remember that it takes time for search engines to index and rank your site. SEO needs patience, perseverance, technical expertise and continuous monitoring to bring results. If that doesn’t sound like you, there is an alternate solution – our Perth SEO team! Contact us or reach out to us at sales@computingaustralia.group to know how we can help with SEO for your new website.
Jargon Busters
Search intent: Search intent refers to the purpose of an online search query.
Google crawl: Crawling is the process by which Google finds new or updated pages to add to its site index.